This paper investigates the impact of road tolling in rural China. The country's lack of capital for transport development has made tolls a common place. Toll roads have been established in both urban and rural areas. Examining the interactions between peasants and rural markets in a county in Guangdong province, this study demonstrated road tolling has restricted people's choice of market venu...

Formal financial institutions failed to reach the poorer sections of the rural society due to informational asymmetry, moral hazard and enforcement problems. The necessity of having alternative rural credit systems which will solve the problems of rural credit institutions is clearly warranted. Micro finance institutions are seen to have characteristics that help solve the problems moral hazard...

This article introduces ways to create proper IT services which can help organizations serve the emerging rural markets. The research is based on a two-year action research project which derives a framework for building IT services for the low-income consumers in the rural area of China. The framework is proposed to understand the characteristics that the consumers in the rural area use the IT ...

Street dust is a hazard for workers in traditional markets. Exposure time is longer than for other people, making them vulnerable to heavy metals in street dust. This study investigated heavy metal concentrations in street dust samples collected from different types of markets. It compared the results with heavy metal concentrations in heavy traffic and rural areas. Street dust was significantl...

The overall goal of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing assessment of China’s rural labor markets. To meet this goal, we have three specific objectives. First, we will provide an update of the trends in off-farm labor participation and wages of the sample households and examine how labor market outcomes have changed for those with different levels of education. Second, we will then seek ...

We use nationally representative survey data from two neighboring countries in Southern Africa – Zambia and Malawi – to characterize the current status of rural land rental market participation by smallholder farmers. We find that rural rental market participation is strongly conditioned by land scarcity, and thus is more advanced in Malawi than in lower-density Zambia. In both countries, we fi...

Improved sanitation access is extremely low in rural Cambodia. Non-governmental organizations have helped build local supply side latrine markets to promote household latrine purchase and use, but households cite inability to pay as a key barrier to purchase. To examine the extent to which microfinance can be used to facilitate household investment in sanitation, we applied a twopronged assessm...

This paper analyses the determinants of household farms’ participation in land rental markets in transition countries and what affects their access to land through rental markets. We derive several theoretical hypotheses on the impact of households’ management ability, land endowment, land quality and prices, transaction costs in the land market, rural credit and labour market constraints. We t...

The direct benefits of infrastructure in developing countries can be large, but if new infrastructure induces in-migration, congestion of other local publicly provided goods may offset the direct benefits. Using the example of rural household electrification in South Africa, we demonstrate the importance of accounting for migration when evaluating welfare gains of spatial programs. We also prov...

Despite considerable debate as to Wal-Mart’s impact on retail workers, to date there has been little structural analysis on the topic. This paper measures and tests for Wal-Mart’s monopsony power in local labor markets using a dominant-firm model and data on contiguous U.S. counties where the company operates. Empirical results show that Wal-Mart’s monopsony power over workers varies significan...